time been engaged upon a trigo-nometrical survey of the district,
and consequently had an accurate knowledge of its topography.
His idea now was to draw up a report of his investigations:
to whom that report should be delivered was a problem he had
yet to solve.

During the four hours of daylight that still remained,
the travelers rode about twenty-one miles from the river mouth.
To their vast surprise, they did not meet a single human being.
At nightfall they again encamped in a slight bend of the shore,
at a point which on the previous evening had faced the mouth
of the Mina, one of the left-hand affluents of the Shelif,
but now absorbed into the newly revealed ocean. Ben Zoof made
the sleeping accommodation as comfortable as the circumstances
would allow; the horses were clogged and turned out to feed
upon the rich pasture that clothed the shore, and the night
passed without special incident.

At sunrise on the following morning, the 2nd of January, or what,
according to the ordinary calendar, would have been the night of the 1st,
the captain and his orderly remounted their horses, and during
the six-hours' day accomplished a distance of forty-two miles.
The right bank of the river still continued to be the margin
of the land, and only in one spot had its integrity been impaired.
This was about twelve miles from the Mina, and on the site of the annex
or suburb of Surkelmittoo. Here a large portion of the bank had been
swept away, and the hamlet, with its eight hundred inhabitants,
had no doubt been swallowed up by the encroaching waters.
It seemed, therefore, more than probable that a similar fate had
overtaken the larger towns beyond the Shelif.